Nowadays, mobile devices such as mobile phones are routinely capable of providing identification of their location. The mobile device may include a GPS module to determine its location using global positioning by satellite, may be adapted to identify its location by providing information about base stations to which the mobile device is connected such that the location of the mobile device can be approximated from a known location of one or more base stations to which the mobile device is connected, e.g. using triangulation methods, the mobile phone may be adapted to employ such triangulation techniques to estimate its own location from its affiliation with base stations having known positions, and so on. Many other location identification techniques are routinely available.
The ability of such mobile devices to provide an identification of their location has facilitated the provisioning of location-restricted services to such mobile devices. A service may be location-restricted for a number of reasons, for example because of copyright issues of content to be provided through the service, because of the service including a location-dependent response such as in the case of emergency services, because of location-dependent subscription to the service, e.g. a regional or national service subscription, and so on. In order to gain access to such a service, the mobile device when requesting access typically provides location information from which the service provider can deduce if the mobile device is entitled to gain access to the service.
Mobile devices may attempt to gain unauthorized access to a particular location-restricted service by spoofing their location, i.e. by providing false location information to the service provider. Methods exist that seek to verify location identification provided by a mobile device in order to detect location spoofing and prevent an unauthorized mobile device from falsely gaining access to a location-restricted service. Such methods for instance may rely on the exchange of time-stamped certificates between a mobile device and a wireless access point to the service provider, amongst other well-known spoofing prevention methods. Such methods may fail when the two parties involved in providing verification information for the location identification provided by the mobile device collude to falsify the verification process.